


The Molecular Structure of Endings

by brighter



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Ambiguously hopeful ending, But there are tattoos, Canon-Typical Violence, Carlos is just human, Cecil is too, Death by Accident, Death by illness, Detailed definitions of clinical death, Dubiously accurate science, Established Relationship, Futurefic, It's actually kind of a happy fic minus the death, M/M, Permanent Major Character Death, Possible Spoilers up to Episode 28, Present Tense, Sorry for all the death, Thanks Wikipedia, The moving/glowing/changing kind, Unexplained Minor Character Death, Well as human as one can be in Night Vale, What I mean is no tentacles, temporary major character death, third person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-12
Updated: 2013-08-12
Packaged: 2017-12-23 06:24:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/923060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brighter/pseuds/brighter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been forty eight years, and Cecil still whispers, voice sleepy and small: "stay."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Molecular Structure of Endings

**Author's Note:**

> Hi readers! This is my first fic in around two years (and, let's be honest here, that fic was on ff.net and it was less than an thousand words. This is my first real fic.), and it's definitely my first for this fandom. Please pardon my headcanon for Cecil and/or Carlos if it doesn't match yours; I'd just finished this podcast series once through recently--this apology also goes towards any inconsistencies with canon.

Carlos knows death.

Some three years post his arrival to the strange little desert town, he gets a phone call from a young, female voice he doesn't recognise, identifying herself as Doctor Nguyen. Doctors never call personally—it's always a bright secretary reminding you of your upcoming appointment, urging you to confirm—unless someone you're listed as a contact for is dying, or, well. Dead.

So, to put it succinctly (a thesis statement, a hypothesis no one wants to reach), he's pretty sure his mother is dead, as his only surviving relative and the only person he'd be worth calling about. The voice at the other end of the line confirms his theory. He swallows, thanks her for the news, and hangs up. The newfound knowledge is enough to metaphorically tear him at the ligaments, destroying his foundations, suddenly telling him: you have nowhere to call home.

Except, that night, Cecil holds him together as he comes undone, somehow _knowing_ , grasp like a promise. "You have me," Cecil says, "I'll be your home, if you'll let me."

And somehow, that manages to be enough.

 

* * *

 

On the eighth Christmas Eve, there are angels, and they are holding guns.

Old Woman Josie assures Cecil, via text message, that these are not real angels. _Seriously,_ it reads, _they won’t respond to the name Erika._

She claims that's proof enough, but adds: _anyway, angels don’t exist, remember?_ in a fairly spiteful tone (despite the fact that you can't _technically_ hear voices through text). The message is followed up by an announcement request from the Sheriff's Secret Police, saying that the angels with guns are being taken care of, despite their steady denial that there were no angels in the first place.

"Nevertheless, Night Vale," announces Cecil cheerfully over the radio, "we are most assuredly safe, or as safe as one can be while a governmental, junkie bear is rambling about."

The show ends a few minutes later: "Stay tuned for eighty three commercial-free minutes of the phrase 'effervescent porcupines' repeated in various African dialects. Or, alternatively, spend the entire evening boarding up your fireplace to prevent the terrifying, terrifying Santa come to visit your children. I strongly recommend the latter. Goodnight, Night Vale. Goodnight."

He goes on a date, afterwards. Carlos feels like it isn't Christmas, not while the hot winds whip at his lab coat, but he remembers that somewhere, even now, there is snow. Cecil simply revels in the feeling of the beautiful, perfect man's hand, held like an anchor in the ocean bed around his fingers. Swirly, earth-toned tattoos dance on his palm, flocking like police to a crime scene where they meet Carlos. They walk across town, no destination in mind but the companionable silence. Carlos smokes a cigarette, and Cecil pretends it doesn't bother him. They stop to toss it in a bin.

Then, an angel shoots Cecil. At least, that's what Carlos swears he saw—an eight foot tall, aqua-skinned, plaid button-down something that he only knows is an angel by the way his presence burned in a startlingly corporeal manner. And the wings, of course, though they were not feathered but scaled, the colour of bruises, blurry as the angel races away at an inhuman speed. There is smoke trailing him like most people have shadows.

At first, the world seems to quiet, and then Carlos positively _leaps_ at Cecil, who is on the ground and clutching at his own chest. Carlos gently brushes aside Cecil's hand, replacing it with his own, scared to feel the sticky liquid pooling in his palm, but willing to try to fix it.

There is absolutely nothing, only a punctured spot in the patterned T-shirt Cecil wears. Carlos deftly places his index and middle finger across his boyfriend's wrist. The pulse there rings safely, if not a little fast from the adrenaline: a steady 87 beats per minute.

"It's okay," says Cecil, weakly, "it's okay."

 

* * *

 

From a scientific perspective, he knows death, too. Death is just loss, really, no matter how clinically you look at it. Death is the loss of a heartbeat, of lung and other organ functions, of consciousness, and, most tragically, a person. Immediately after you die, some say that you lose 21 grams from your body. Some say this is the weight of a soul.

He memorises the stages of death like the stages of life: with birth and infancy and childhood, there as an equal and opposite reaction, as Newton's law states.

This is the molecular structure of endings: first, the skin takes an ethereal tone, a pallid grey like a polluted winter sky. All the muscles lose their tension—death, the only true freedom.

The skin during death plays out like a painting. Half an hour past the initial grey, it tinges purple; an hour, blood turns the hands and feet blue. At the lowest part of the body, there is nearly-black skin. The entire body is an abstract art. Later, it will all be, at minimum, slightly green.

Body temperature drops quickly, until a day has past and it adapts the temperature of its surroundings. The face becomes nearly impossible to associate with all the emotions and thoughts it once held.

In the end, there will only be teeth.

 

* * *

 

He saw the bullet go through Cecil's chest. His wonderful, bright-eyed Cecil should be limp and immobile, after that. Yet, Cecil, always the miracle, is still here, watching him worriedly from above the bloodstone circle catalogue he is pretending to peruse. Carlos knows he should talk, knows that his silence is causing Cecil to panic, probably assuming he'd done something wrong, when really, what he'd done was something amazingly _right_.

Cecil, against all odds, had lived.

Just when Carlos is about to speak, the questions eager on his tongue, Cecil takes a steadying breath, and starts. "When I was forty years old," he says, "I was hit by a car. It was the most painful thing I had ever experienced, and strangely, the most real. Odd, how I felt as though I was living only through death. The paramedics, who had arrived after the Secret Policeman in charge of me, always watching—you know how it is, they did their job well—had called for them; the paramedics said I should have been dead on impact."

"Cecil," breathes Carlos, and oh, the way he says his name is _reverent_ , Cecil thinks, "you're forty this year."

There's a broken laugh, and then: "Yeah, I've been forty for nearly fifty years."

 

* * *

 

"In the beginning, there was a sweltering desert in the land of the supposedly free. Well. There was a lot of stuff before that, but we're talking about the beginning of something very specific here—the beginning of a town called Night Vale.

"Anyway. That town was, for a very long time, populated with humans and otherkind, and those who didn't belong in either. They lived in peace, there, drawing no boundaries.

"I was born there. My parents were human, completely, but they were haunted the call of something not exactly of this earth. Night Vale was unique, like that, so of course, young and idealistic, they decided to settle. They joined the first batch of humans to live in Night Vale, as the monsters had lived there for quite a while longer.

"Somehow, we managed not to die. Well. We did until I was finished high school, which was when my mother passed, and my father shortly followed. I mourned them for a bit, but wanted to get back to my life. There were no universities in Night Vale, and there weren't any jobs that needed at degree, so it seemed okay.

"That's when I got my job at the radio station. Before my broadcast, there was only a lights show. No one knew if there were actually lights, because all you could hear was a flicking motion, presumably, a light switch going on and off. Not that we could see said lights show. It was pretty useless.

"But I digress. I asked Station Management if I could do a show, through a series of yodels, and they agreed to sign me on. The contract, you see, literally was valid forever. I didn't understand what they meant by that, not at first; the prospect of getting my own show with good pay and health insurance was distracting enough.

"Health insurance, it turned out, was state of the art--it was so valuable, they never offered it to anyone else. They said it would start when I needed it. And, a couple months after my thirty second birthday, it did. I was hit by a car, while I was distractedly glancing up at a dark planet while walking on the main highway.

"Here's where it gets familiar. The paramedics said I should have died on impact, but I didn't. They said somebody saved me. I protested, of course—how could I have been saved when I literally felt the car go through and crack my ribs?

"Then, when I got home, the sky the colour of unbrushed teeth and strongly diluted grape juice, I re-read the contract. I noticed the 'forever', this time around.

"Carlos," says Cecil, and it sounds like the desperate prayer of a drowning man for air. For a while, no one says anything. They marvel at each other's continued breaths. Cecil's left forearm is nearly covered entirely by a series of hearts, all anatomically correct, all pulsing nervously, overlapping, the infinity of his life.

"You don't age?" Carlos begins, keenly aware of the questions already mentally sorting themselves. "You _lied_ about your age? You can still feel pain? You don't get any scars?"

The answer to all of them is yes, and Carlos feels it once more: the disconcerting sensation of internal conflict, but for different reasons, today. He asks guiltily—"There were others, right? Before me?"

Cecil blinks slowly, and the hearts glow like a microwave oven in the night time.

"No," he admits, biting his lip, "only you."

"Say it again."

"Only—"

Carlos kisses him and kisses him and kisses him, because he had thought _he_ was the lonely one, oh, how wrong he was. _Nearly fifty years_ , he thinks, _God, what it must have been like, half a century and then some, without this_.

 

* * *

 

"Twenty five years," murmurs Cecil into the grey hair near Carlos' left ear while Carlos brushes his teeth, "twenty five years with my beautiful, perfect Carlos."

He knows Cecil calls him that mostly out of habit, after so much time, but it still makes him grin behind the green foam of the only toothpaste permitted by the City Council: algae and spinach flavoured. It tasted terrible, but it worked and it smelled fine, so Carlos was happy with what he could get.

Spitting into the sink, Carlos hums, "I love you," because he doesn't say it nearly as often as he feels it, which is always. Loving Cecil is a background noise in his universe, when it should really be the first clarinet in his world's leading orchestra.

In the reflection of the bathroom mirror (ignoring the bubbly sprite that lived inside it and the shadow of The Faceless Old Woman) he sees Cecil smile wide.

"I love you, too. I love your karaoke sessions in the shower even if the songs are technically banned this week because they aren't by The Beatles, and your teeth like a military graveyard, and the way you say my name. I love you like all science secretly adores magic, like the Glow Cloud loves injuring citizens with various dead poultry, like time loves going by too fast when we're together. I have lived for longer than you by more than double your own lifespan, and during that time, I was waiting. And the thing I was waiting for, though I had not yet known it, was you."

Carlos doesn't sing in the shower, that day, because his lips are too busy mapping out Cecil's skin under the spray, every caress saying all that needs to be said and more. He doesn't notice that his stomach is now more wrinkled and saggy than Cecil's. He doesn't notice how the scars, all memories of experiments and adventures, have grown in numbers on his wrists. He doesn't notice how Cecil's skin, a few shades than lighter beeswax, is unmaimed save for his ever-changing tattoos. He doesn't notice any of it—nothing at all.

 

* * *

 

In the end, Carlos does not end up dying because of the Dog Park, or a malevolent librarian, or even one too many Miscellaneous Mystery Meat foot-longs at Subway. He doesn't die by Night Vale's hand at all.

It's the cigarettes that bring him to his fate. The doctors say things like _CT scans_ and _any shortness of breath?_ and _most people at this stage have only a year._ The next months are a blur of hospital beds and almost surprisingly competent Night Valean doctors. In this sea of uncertainty, only one thing remains, a lighthouse to bring him back to shore—Cecil. Loyal, sad, Cecil, who is breaking right in front of him.

It's been forty eight years, and Cecil still whispers, voice sleepy and small: "stay."

Cecil grabs his hand tightly, pupils small and eyes manic in the acute, fluorescent light of the hospital: not even holding it, not caressing it, full-on needy _grasping_. On his forearm, Carlos can read scrawled words that shift when he notices them. He reads on one that may have previously said "shaking hands reaching": "I need you. Don't leave me. You make me feel like a flesh wound. You're my scar tissue, oh Carlos. I _need_ you."

There are five petalled, blue-purple flowers blooming around Cecil's left eye. Carlos doesn't know what they mean, but they are beautiful. Something aches inside him, not quite at his lungs, maybe a pang a little closer to his heart.

 

* * *

 

One day, when Cecil is convinced by Carlos to do his job, _it'll be good for you to get out of this miserable place_ , he gets a phone call. It's from a doctor.

 

* * *

 

After Cecil runs into the hospital room, he finds Carlos, limp and sickly, cheeks devoid of colour, sitting against the pillow.

Cecil plants himself tenderly on the hospital bed, and places his palm on Carlos' forehead. The skin is clammy and icy in a way no person's should be. For now, however, Carlos is here, breath in pants, but utterly alive nonetheless.

"I love you," says Carlos, voice straining, and that alone is nearly enough to crack Cecil apart, like a splitting continent where his chest is, "like an office worker loves reality shows, like a Londoner loves the sun, like a monster loves humans.

"You're not just my world, Cecil, you're my Milky Way, my galaxy, all my constellations. A dying man once told me—it's okay. It's okay."

Carlos presses a soft kiss to Cecil's mouth. Cecil tries his best not to sob into him.

"Please, Carlos. I'd give anything. Stay."

There is nothing to say, so Carlos opts to quirk his lips to one side, a sort of smile. "I can't stay for long, but you can keep me company. I love you, Cecil."

"I love you, too, Carlos. You're everything. You're—you are all I've ever wanted, needed. I love you. I do. I love you, love you. Love you."

Here, at the end of it, neither of them say goodbye. Instead, they share each other's oxygen until Carlos' breaths go too rapidly, then, don't go at all.

 

* * *

 

For a man that will conceivably never die, Cecil knows too much about death. He stays with Carlos until his skin goes too cold to lie on, then he calls for a nurse and takes a drive home, the street in front of him only illuminated by the forget-me-nots that have spread from his face to cover both his arms. They begin materialising at his collar bone, too, fading softly to break the desert darkness, peeking from underneath his shirt.

He has a visit to make, tonight. Cecil pulls up to Night Vale Community Radio Station, only trembling slightly, and knocks on Station Management's door.

**Author's Note:**

> (Edited many times after the initial posting, with thanks to all the commenters that helped--most especially _M_Elliot_ and _neveralarch_.)
> 
> Forget-me-nots symbolise undying devotion and remembrance. Sources for both the process of death and information on Carlos' heavily implied lung cancer can be cited.
> 
> I am Canadian, which means, sometimes, I inconsistently switch between UK and US spellings--sorry! I am also fairly sucky with tenses; this is unbeta'd (as I have no friends); I've no background in Science; and, lastly, I'm all of thirteen years old, so I'd really appreciate any concrit in your reviews! 
> 
> Thanks for reading: it means the world. Seriously, rock on.


End file.
